Notes on Gender and Pronouns

So I was in the middle of writing what's probably the next post here (Universal Skills #3 - the Five-Minute Biography) and I realized that to speak precisely I was forced to use pronouns. Yes, gender-definite ones.

I initially had the urge to try to de-genderize these pronouns -- to neuter them, if you will -- but then realized there is little point in it. If anything, neutering my pronouns was to take meaning and force away from them. Pronouns are already pretty weak, and if the point of a sentence is weakened by changing a well-deserved "he" to a limp and ineffectual "they," why bother?

Then there's the grammatical angle. Really, when I say "someone," the appropriate subsequent pronoun should never be "they." "They" is plural, "someone" is singular. My English-teaching mom would hit me if she ever read that. So, out it goes. "She" is singular, "he" is singular and I'm usually writing about he's and she's, not gender-neutral, plural "they's".

And so, two points about subsequent posts:

1. The Gentleman is a "he." Whether he is actually a he or not, he will be referred to as a "he" in the GentleManual. I don't care what you have between your legs, but when you're being a gentleman, you're a he, if only for the purposes of simplicity.
2. The Gentleman's date is a "she." This is a bit more contentious than my assertion that the gentleman be a he, but again, for simplicity's sake, we'll call her a she. There is no gender agenda here, and really, I hope that people get plenty of use out of this material when dating a "non-she."
   

So, gentlemen and aspiring gentlemen, be assured that, as I continue to write this, I will not have neutered you, nor have I spayed your date. In the next article I post, the why here should start to become apparent.